"TV is such a monster. It swallows up all this animation so fast that nobody seems to care whether it's good or bad. These kids shows are badly done technically; it seems as though nobody really looks at them but the kids… the networks don't look at the show, they just look at the ratings. If the ratings are good, to heck with the show. They don't care whether it's just a bouncing ball."

Unfortunately, the budgetary constraints became ever more onerous on producers, with rock bottom arguably being Clutch Cargo with its ridiculous "Synchro-Vox" method of using live action lips speaking the dialogue; at least Gantray-Lawrence's xerography method for The Marvel Super Heroes largely captured the heady energy of artists like Jack Kirby to make it look like the Superhero comics have come to life. Furthermore, the Animation Age Ghetto was made all the worse with parents groups pressuring the networks to impose ever more onerous and arbitrary content restrictions, such as The Complainer Is Always Wrong and Never Say "Die" while classic cartoons like Looney Tunes were censored to near oblivion. In fact, it got to the point where basic conflict, the soul of drama, was all but discouraged on Saturday mornings, creating bland stuff like The Get Along Gang, and the short development period for greenlit shows before the season opening made things worse. However, that lobbying did have some positive results – the push for educational programming helped create the classic Schoolhouse Rock shorts, which taught whole generations with wonderfully tuneful songs.

In somewhat better artistic position was the realm of prime time TV specials, which didn't have the overwhelming budgetary and production time demands of full series. For instance, there was Rankin-Bass, which created a large series of Stop Motion productions in a process called Animagic such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town. There was also the animated adaptations of the Peanuts comic strip by Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez beginning with the instant-classic A Charlie Brown Christmas, whose rushed production was more than compensated by a profound artistic sincerity and the jazz music compositions by Vince Guaraldi.

However, this does not mean everything from this era was bad. Disney's output remained respectable and generally well animated. However, the failure of the lavish feature film Sleeping Beauty prompted both a downsizing of the animation studio and a retreat from fairy tales for the next 30 years. These changes showed in their next feature, 101 Dalmatians, their first film to be unambiguously set in contemporary times. Furthermore, the studio took advantage of a new technology called xerography, a dry photocopying process that eliminated the need to hand-ink the animation, which was the only practical way to produce a film with such visual complexity. However, the technology only allowed for black outlines, which forced a hard scratchy visual style for years until The Rescuers when softer outlines with various colors were possible.

In addition, Walt Disney began to draw away his focus on films due to his increased interest for television and theme park projects at the time. Disney had been feeling more and more creatively stifled as the decades moved on; the bold, experimental projects that had made him a household name in the 1920s and 1930s nearly ruined him in the 1940s as audiences' tastes changed. In the 1950s he decided to play it a bit safer and released more family-friendly material, while focusing his energy on other ventures. He attempted one last shot at a more experimental animated film at the end of the decade with Sleeping Beauty, but as mentioned above the film was a box office failure. That consequently had a noticeable effect on the quality of the 1960s Disney films, and the death of Walt in the middle of the decade hit the company extremely hard, sending their studio into a hard slump post-Jungle Book. Although they would release afewfeatures that critics enjoyed and made money, Disney continued to struggle, forced to use re-releases and the theme parks to stay afloat, until the release of twomovies in the late 80's that were huge hits with critics and audiences and showed that they finally recovered enough to be compared to their Golden Age heights.

Looney Tunes was still producing some decent and entertaining shorts late in The '50s, as some of its most memorable shorts were from this decade. Animation quality was down, but the writing, along with the direction of Chuck Jones, managed to produce some timeless classics in spite of that. However, due to budget problems, Warner Bros. forcibly shut down its animation studio for good in 1963 (though a brief revival was unsuccessfully attempted late during the '60s). The characters would get a revival in the form of the smash hit anthology repackaging series The Bugs Bunny Show, which reaired many of their old theatrical cartoons and, being exposed to younger audiences, ultimately helped to immortalize the characters as pop culture icons. In syndication, The Porky Pig Show did the same for many other shorts that weren't shown on its parent series. (And not just Warner Bros., either; if any motion picture company had a theatrical short to their name, animated or not, they would be on the bandwagon). The surviving players of the Golden Age were about to get back in the game in a big way.

Animator Ralph Bakshi, who got his start in this era working in the twilight years of Terrytoons, rose to prominence during this era thanks to Fritz the Cat. This film, along with Watership Down, challenged the idea that cartoons were solely "kids' stuff", an idea that was becoming increasingly popular at the time due to the diminishing quality of the cartoons of that time period, as well as people becoming overly familiar with the Disney style of family oriented entertainment coming out.

Bakshi would also go on to make a variety of animated features that challenged the Animation Age Ghetto such as an animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, which despite extremely mixed critical reaction was ultimately a box office success. Lesser films included the downbeat urban drama, Heavy Traffic, the musical history drama American Pop and the Frank Frazetta-inspired fantasy, Fire and Ice. The Canadian Heavy Metal would create its own cult interest late in the game (1981) with its erotic dark fantasy stories set to throbbing music. Even Hanna-Barbera brought a respectable adaptation of Charlotte's Web to the big screen in 1973. Some cartoons from this era may have had mediocre to poor animation but were ultimately saved by good writing; shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle would be a particularly good example of that. Likewise, Terry Gilliam's surreal animated skits in Monty Python's Flying Circus – utilizing his own artwork, antique photographs, and classical music and military marches played at double speed – would prove to be enormously influential.

The Soviet Russia reversal, however, is still at its dirty job. Behind the "iron curtain", many USSR cartoons saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Some are dark, some are educational, some are just damn fun. And not only were they successful inside the country (we're not even speaking about a huge amount of fans who love them even today and make English translations of these cartoons for you)… one even got a ton of awards. Considerably, the animation cut was not an option for Ivan Ivanov-Vano's cartoons made in this era, every one of which made you feel like you're back to Disney's times of rise when hand-drawn people and animals moved as smooth as never before (and after). However, Eastern European Animation also brought us Gene Deitch's Tom and Jerry shorts in the 1960s, which were… interesting to say the least.

Animation Age Ghetto is a trope that has its roots firmly planted in this era, due to a growing emphasis on conservative values from the 50's onward that led to Moral Guardians attacking anything that they didn't consider child-friendly. Check it out to see the full impact of this era on the typical viewer's idea of a cartoon nowadays.

Chances are whenever you see a parody of this era or something that was made during it, it's either a Take That! or an Affectionate Parody at the least.

Banjo the Woodpile Cat: Don Bluth's first solo project, which showed some light at the end of the very dark tunnel this era of animation was. A few years later, he would quit Disney and form his own animation company, which would fuel the animation renaissance.

Disney Animated Canon: This is known to some as Disney's "sketchy" period, referring to the style of animation these movies employed. Animated movies were made on the cheap, often recycling animation from older Disney classics. Don Bluth got his start here as well, as anyone with a good eye for animation will be able to tell just by watching these. With the death of Walt Disney, the dark age of animation hit the company particularly hard. The Disney studios were nearly closed for good around this time, and wouldn't recover until the 1980s.

Joe Oriolo Felix The Cat: In the very late 1950s, Felix the Cat managed to snag himself a decent TV series under the helm of former Otto Messmer alumni Joe Oriolo, and even introduced his iconic magic bag of tricks, even though his character was still using the flanderized portrayal similar to the ill-fated 1930s Van Beuren Felix revival.

Peanuts (the various TV specials, The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, and feature films) — a high point of Limited Animation from the period, not so much for the graphics, which were lifted directly from the newspaper comic, as for the mature storytelling and jazzy soundtrack.

Tom and Jerry: Revived three times during this era. First by Gene Deitch (the less said, the better), then by Chuck Jones (generally considered the best produced theatrical cartoons of the 1960s, though that isn't saying much), and finally as a Hanna-BarberaTV series (which Flanderized the characters beyond recognition, ironically by the very people who created them in the first place).

Watership Down by Martin Rosen. Concept drawings by John Hubley for the dream sequences. Hubley wanted to do the whole film in Limited Animation using Aboriginal-style 60s-70s primitive expressionism. He left the film over "creative differences" with Rosen, who wanted detailed and bloody naturalism. You decide which parts of the film are more disturbing.

Bill Melendez: Lead animator for most of the Peanuts films & specials.

Don Bluth resumed working during this era, after leaving Disney in the early 60s to go on his Mormon recruitment mission, eventually getting fed up with the public's complacency with mediocracy and was famously the first animator who did something about it.

June Foray: Did a lot of the voice acting she was famous for during this era.

Osamu Tezuka: Started doing animation in this era, founding his studio Mushi Production.

Recycled In SPACE: A recurring theme (Jabberjaw is Scooby-Doo under water, The Mighty Mightor was Space Ghost as a caveman, Gilligan's Planet LITERALLY had the Castaways in space, etc.), particularly for the Sat AM Hanna-Barbera and Filmation cartoons.

Show, Don't Tell: Most cartoons of this time were seriously bad about following this. In addition to the paltry budgets the studios worked with, some of them such as Filmation were so rigid that you were literally never allowed to draw anything but a handful of stock expressions and poses without being considered "off model". This regimented system precluded any kind of expressive animation or real character acting, so more often than not, studios fell back on the soundtracks of their cartoons (namely the voice acting) as the backbone of cartoons (as Chuck Jones called it, "illustrated radio").

However, there were some exceptions that followed the classic animation pantomime tradition, such as Chuck Jones' Tom and Jerry shorts and Sib Tower 12 shorts, Disney's cartoons, Richard Williams's early works and Depatie Freleng's Pink Panther shorts. Independent animators like Norman Mclaren and Ralph Bakshi, despite eschewing the old fashioned tradition of animation acting, also relied on heavy visual storytelling to put their ideas across instead of the soundtrack alone.

So Bad, It's Good: The only reason most of the cartoons made in this era are still remembered is because of how unbelievably awful they were.

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